Oleg Gordievsky: The Greatest Spy You've Never Heard Of

How a Russian Double Agent Prevented a Nuclear War

Throughout much of the Cold War, the British Secret Service gained invaluable information from Oleg Gordievsky, a highly placed KGB officer whose love of classical music (and hatred of awful Soviet parade marches) pushed him into becoming the perfect double agent. While the British never revealed the identity of their mole to the CIA, the Americans’ search for the British mole’s identity eventually led to the revelation of his name to his superiors, sealing Gordievsky’s fate, just before the whole Soviet apparatus came tumbling down. Here, we learn of the crisis that first put Gordievsky on the CIA’s radar, and the extreme paranoia and stupidity that nearly caused a nuclear war.

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In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union.

For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense detente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest.

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The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat.

And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears.

Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched. To his stunned KGB audience, with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, alongside him, Andropov announced that the US and NATO were “actively preparing for nuclear war.” The task of the KGB was to find signs that this attack might be imminent and provide early warning, so that the Soviet Union was not taken by surprise. By implication, if proof of an impending attack could be found, then the Soviet Union could itself launch a preemptive strike. Andropov’s experience in suppressing liberty in Soviet satellite states had convinced him that the best method of defense was attack. Fear of a first strike threatened to provoke a first strike.

Operation RYAN was born in Andropov’s fevered imagination. It grew steadily, metastasizing into an intelligence obsession within the KGB and GRU (military intelligence), consuming thousands of man-hours and helping to ratchet up tension between the superpowers to terrifying levels. RYAN even had its own imperative motto: “Ne Prozerot!—Don’t Miss It!” In November 1981 the first RYAN directives were dispatched to KGB field stations in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and Third World countries. In early 1982 all rezidenturas were instructed to make RYAN a top priority. By the time Gordievsky arrived in London, the operation had already acquired a self-propelling momentum. But it was based on a profound misapprehension. America was not preparing a first strike. The KGB hunted high and low for evidence of the planned attack, but as MI5’s authorized history observes: “No such plans existed.”

In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe.

In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe. Hitler had been certain that the D-day invasion force would land at Calais, so that is what his spies (with help from Allied double agents) told him, ensuring the success of the Normandy landings. Tony Blair and George W. Bush were convinced that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that is what their intelligence services duly concluded. Yuri Andropov, pedantic and autocratic, was utterly convinced that his KGB minions would find evidence of a looming nuclear assault. So that is what they did.

Gordievsky had been briefed on Operation RYAN before leaving Moscow. When this far-reaching KGB policy initiative was revealed to MI6, the Soviet experts in Century House at first treated the report with skepticism. Did the geriatrics of the Kremlin really misunderstand Western morality so completely as to believe America and NATO could attack first? Surely this was just alarmist nonsense from a veteran KGB crank? Or perhaps, even more sinister, a deliberate misinformation ploy intended to persuade the West to back off and scale down the military buildup? The intelligence community was dubious. James Spooner wondered: could the Center really be “so out of touch with the real world”?

But, in November 1982, Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader, becoming the first KGB chief to be elected general secretary of the Communist Party. Soon after, rezidenturas were informed that RYAN was “now of particularly grave importance” and had “acquired an especial degree of urgency.” A telegram duly arrived at the KGB’s London station, addressed to Arkadi Guk (under his alias, “Yermakov”), labeled “strictly personal” and “top secret.” Gordievsky smuggled it out of the embassy in his pocket, and handed it to Spooner.

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Entitled “Permanent Operational Assignment to Uncover NATO Preparations for a Nuclear-Missile Attack on the USSR,” this was the RYAN blueprint, chapter and verse on the various indicators that should alert the KGB to preparations for an attack by the West. The document was proof that Soviet fears of a first strike were genuine, deeply held, and growing. It stated: “The objective of the assignment is to see that the rezidentura works systematically to uncover any plans in preparation by the main adversary [the United States] for RYAN, and to organize continual watch to be kept for indications of a decision being taken to use nuclear weapons against the USSR or immediate preparations being made for a nuclear-missile attack.” The document listed twenty indications of a potential attack, ranging from the logical to the ridiculous. KGB officers were instructed to carry out close surveillance of “key nuclear decision-makers” including, bizarrely, church leaders and top bankers. Buildings where such a decision might be taken should be closely watched, as well as nuclear depots, military installations, evacuation routes, and bomb shelters. Agents should be recruited as a matter of urgency within government, military, intelligence, and civil-defense organizations. Officers were even encouraged to count how many lights were switched on at night in key government buildings, since officials would be burning the midnight oil preparatory to a strike. The number of cars in government parking lots should also be counted: a sudden demand for parking spaces at the Pentagon, for example, might indicate preparations for an attack. Hospitals should also be watched, since the enemy would expect retaliation for its first strike and make provision for multiple casualties. A similarly close eye should be kept on slaughterhouses: if the number of cattle killed at abattoirs increased sharply, that might indicate that the West was stockpiling hamburgers prior to Armageddon.

The oddest injunction was to monitor “the level of blood held in blood banks,” and report if the government began buying up blood supplies and stockpiling plasma. “One important sign that preparations are beginning for RYAN could be increased purchases of blood from donors and the prices paid for it . . . discover the location of the several thousand blood donor reception centers and the price of blood, and record any changes . . . if there is an unexpectedly sharp increase in the number of blood donor centers and the prices paid, report at once to the Center.”

In the West, of course, blood is donated by members of the public. The only payment is a cookie, and sometimes a cup of juice. The Kremlin, however, assuming that capitalism penetrated every aspect of Western life, believed that a “blood bank” was, in fact, a bank, where blood could be bought and sold. No one in the KGB outstations dared to draw attention to this elemental misunderstanding. In a craven and hierarchical organization, the only thing more dangerous than revealing your own ignorance is to draw attention to the stupidity of the boss.

The more perceptive and experienced KGB officers knew there was no appetite for nuclear war in the West, let alone a surprise attack launched by NATO and the US.

Gordievsky and his colleagues were initially dismissive of this peculiar shopping list of demands, seeing Operation RYAN as just another example of pointless, ill-informed make-work by the Center. The more perceptive and experienced KGB officers knew there was no appetite for nuclear war in the West, let alone a surprise attack launched by NATO and the US. Guk himself only “paid lip service to the Center’s demands,” which he considered “ridiculous.” But obedience was more powerful than common sense in the world of Soviet intelligence, and KGB stations across the world dutifully began searching for evidence of hostile plans. And, inevitably, finding them. Almost any human behavior, if scrutinized sufficiently intensely, can begin to seem suspicious: a light left on in the Foreign Office, a parking shortage at the Ministry of Defence, a potentially bellicose bishop. As the “evidence” of the nonexistent plan to attack the USSR accumulated, it seemed to confirm what the Kremlin already feared, increasing paranoia in the Center and prompting fresh demands for proof. Thus do myths self-perpetuate. Gordievsky called it “a vicious spiral of intelligence gathering and evaluation, with foreign stations feeling obliged to report alarming information even if they did not believe it.”

Over the following months, Operation RYAN became the single dominant preoccupation of the KGB. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of the Reagan administration reinforced the Kremlin’s conviction that America was on an aggressive path to lopsided nuclear war. Early in 1983, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” The impending deployment of Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles in West Germany added to Soviet fears. These weapons had a “super-sudden first-strike capability,” and could hit hard Soviet targets, including missile silos, without warning, in as little as four minutes. The flight time to Moscow was estimated to be around six minutes. If the KGB gave sufficient warning of an attack, this would allow Moscow “a period of anticipation essential . . . to take retaliatory measures”: in other words, to strike first. In March, Ronald Reagan made a public announcement that threatened to neuter any such preemptive retaliation anyway: America’s Strategic Defense Initiative, immediately known as “Star Wars,” envisaged the use of satellites and space-based weapons to create a shield able to shoot down incoming Soviet nuclear missiles. It could render the West invulnerable, and enable the US to launch an attack without fear of retaliation. Andropov furiously accused Washington of “inventing new plans on how to unleash a nuclear war in the best way, with the hope of winning it . . . Washington’s actions are putting the entire world in jeopardy.” The RYAN program was expanded: for Andropov and his obedient KGB underlings, this was a matter of Soviet survival.

A state that feared imminent conflict was increasingly likely to lash out first. RYAN demonstrated, in the most emphatic way, just how unstable the Cold War confrontation had become.

At first, MI6 interpreted RYAN as encouraging additional evidence of KGB incompetence: an organization devoted to searching for a phantom plot would have little time for more effective espionage. But as time passed, and the angry rhetoric escalated on both sides, it became clear that the Kremlin’s fears could not bedismissed as mere time-wasting fantasy. A state that feared imminent conflict was increasingly likely to lash out first. RYAN demonstrated, in the most emphatic way, just how unstable the Cold War confrontation had become.

Washington’s hawkish stance was feeding into a Soviet narrative that could end in nuclear Armageddon. American foreign-policy analysts, however, tended to dismiss Soviet expressions of alarm as deliberate exaggerations for the sake of propaganda, part of the long-running game of bluff and counterbluff. But Andropov was serious when he insisted the US was planning to unleash nuclear war—and, thanks to the Russian spy, the British knew it.

America would have to be told that the Kremlin’s fears, though founded on ignorance and paranoia, were sincere.

The relationship between the British and American intelligence agencies is a little like that between older and younger siblings: close but competitive, friendly but jealous, mutually supportive but prone to spats. Both Britain and America had suffered high-level penetration by Communist agents in the past, and both nursed the lingering suspicion that the other might be unreliable. Under established agreements, intercepted signals intelligence was pooled, but information gathered from human sources was shared more sparingly. America had spies Britain knew nothing about, and vice versa. The “product” from those sources was proffered on a “need to know” basis, and the definition of necessity was variable.

Gordievsky’s revelations about Operation RYAN were passed to the CIA in a way that was helpful, but economical with the truth. Hitherto, NOCTON material had been distributed exclusively to “indoctrinated” intelligence readers within MI6 and MI5 and, on an ad hoc basis, to PET, as well as the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office, and the Foreign Office. The decision to widen the circle of distribution to include the US intelligence community marked a critical juncture in the case. MI6 did not say which part of the world the material came from, or who had supplied it. The source was carefully camouflaged and underplayed, the intelligence packaged in such a way that its origin was obscured. “The decision was taken to pass filleted, edited material as normal CX [an intelligence report]. We had to disguise the provenance. We said it came from a middle-ranking official, not in London. We had to make it look as bland as possible.” But the Americans were in no doubt about the authenticity and reliability of what they were hearing: this was information of the highest grade, trustworthy and valuable. MI6 did not tell the CIA that the intelligence came from within the KGB. But it probably did not need to.

So began one of the most important intelligence-sharing operations of the twentieth century.

Slowly, carefully, with quiet pride and subdued fanfare, MI6 began drip-feeding America with Gordievsky’s secrets. British intelligence has long prided itself on running human agents. America might have the money and technological muscle, but the Brits understood people, or liked to believe so. The Gordievsky case compensated, in some measure, for the lasting embarrassments of the Philby years, and it was presented with a slight British swagger. The American intelligence establishment was impressed, intrigued, grateful, and very slightly irked to be patronized by its smaller sibling. The CIA is not used to other agencies deciding what it needs, and does not need, to know.

Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work. His latest book, The Spy and the Traitor, is now out from Crown Publishing Group.